Where ideas are injected into
marketing science

​Mumbrella ​MSIX​ is​ the only conference in Australia that brings together the emerging worlds of marketing sciences with the traditional power of creativity and intuition​.​ The day brought together the best emerging ideas in​ the worlds of marketing science, behavioural economics, ​artificial intelligence and data science, along with new approaches to innovation and creative development.​ You heard from nerds, academics, business owners, chief marketing officers, visionaries and the occasional regular person as they all come together to exchange ideas within the ​intriguing world of marketing sciences. It’s a conference for everyone within research, marketing, media, advertising, data and communications and for those of us who want to take a bit more of an evidence-based approach and be better and more effective at what we do.

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FEATURED IN 2017

Professor Byron Sharp

Director, Ehrenberg-Bass Institute for Marketing Science

Byron Sharp is a Professor of Marketing Science and Director of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute – the world’s largest centre for research into marketing. Based at the University of South Australia, the Institute’s fundamental research is financially supported by many of the world’s leading corporations including Coca-Cola, Kellogg’s, Procter & Gamble, Nielsen, Turner Broadcasting, Mars Inc. and many others.

Byron’s first book How Brands Grow: what marketers don’t know has been called one of the most influential marketing books of the past decade (Warc, 2015) and was voted marketing book of the year by AdAge readers. In 2015 he published the follow-up How Brands Grow Part 2 with Professor Jenni Romaniuk, and he has also written a textbook Marketing: Theory, Evidence, Practice which reflects modern knowledge about marketing and evidence-based thinking. Byron has co-hosted, with Professor Jerry Wind, two conferences at the Wharton Business School on the laws of advertising, and is on the editorial board of five journals.

Green doesn’t rate was the well trodden line in TV, before War on Waste captured Australia’s attention. In this talk Craig will talk through the tone and techniques used in ABC’s 3 part TV series ‘War on Waste’ (http://www.abc.net.au/tv/programs/war-on-waste/) that led to genuine behavioural change in the broader community.

Craig Reucassel

Comedian, Presenter, Waste Warrior

Craig Reucassel is an Australian writer and comedian who is best known for his work with The Chaser and for going through your bins on The War on Waste.

Craig and a group of friends founded The Chaser newspaper, which led to a number of ABC TV Chaser programs including The Election Chaser, CNNNN, The Chaser’s War on Everything, Yes We Canberra and The Hamster Wheel. Most recently he’s appeared on ABC inThe Chaser’s Media Circus, The Chaser’s Election Desk and the current series of satirical consumer affairs show The Checkout. In 2017 Craig hosted the War on Waste on ABC TV.

Craig was born in South Africa but moved to Australia at a young age. He attended Bowral Public School and Bowral High School, but despite this never became a famous cricketer. He then attended the University of Sydney, and graduated with honours in Bachelor of Economics (Social Science) and Bachelor of Laws.

At some point he also co-hosted the triple j shows Today Today, Bloody Sunday and The Race Race with fellow Chaser Chris Taylor. He has performed in David Williamson’s Jack of Hearts and Tim Firth’s Neville’s Island at The Ensemble.
Craig is married with three children. He has a cat and a dog that could do with a walk if you have any time.

Dr Amantha Imber

Founder, Inventium

Dr Amantha Imber is an innovation psychologist, best-selling author, and founder of Australia’s leading innovation consultancy Inventium. Inventium has been recognised as one of Australia’s fastest growing companies in the BRW Fast 100 list, and was also awarded the BRW Client Choice Award for Best Management Consultancy in Australia. In 2016, Amantha was inducted into the Australian Business Women’s Hall of Fame.

With a PhD in organisational psychology, Amantha has helped companies such as Google, Coca-Cola, Disney, LEGO, Red Bull, American Express, Virgin Australia, Commonwealth Bank and many others innovate more successfully. Amantha was a finalist in the 2015 Telstra Business Women of the Year awards.

Amantha is the co-creator of the Australian Financial Review’s Most Innovative Companies list, an annual list that Inventium compiles, ranking Australia’s top innovators. Her thoughts have appeared in Harvard Business Review, The Huffington Post, Forbes, and Fast Company and she is the author of two best-selling books: “The Creativity Formula” and “The Innovation Formula”.

Amantha had an international record deal for her debut album Like Samantha without the S, prays to the God of Kevin Spacey and claims to have once been freakishly good at table tennis.

With so many fails in the world of innovation, it’s a wonder people don’t use more proven techniques for getting innovation right. This talk will tell you how, drawing on real world examples, and the science behind them.

Professor Byron Sharp

Director, Ehrenberg-Bass Institute for Marketing Science

Byron Sharp is a Professor of Marketing Science and Director of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute – the world’s largest centre for research into marketing. Based at the University of South Australia, the Institute’s fundamental research is financially supported by many of the world’s leading corporations including Coca-Cola, Kellogg’s, Procter & Gamble, Nielsen, Turner Broadcasting, Mars Inc. and many others.

Byron’s first book How Brands Grow: what marketers don’t know has been called one of the most influential marketing books of the past decade (Warc, 2015) and was voted marketing book of the year by AdAge readers. In 2015 he published the follow-up How Brands Grow Part 2 with Professor Jenni Romaniuk, and he has also written a textbook Marketing: Theory, Evidence, Practice which reflects modern knowledge about marketing and evidence-based thinking. Byron has co-hosted, with Professor Jerry Wind, two conferences at the Wharton Business School on the laws of advertising, and is on the editorial board of five journals.

Professor Byron Sharp

Director, Ehrenberg-Bass Institute for Marketing Science

Byron Sharp is a Professor of Marketing Science and Director of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute – the world’s largest centre for research into marketing. Based at the University of South Australia, the Institute’s fundamental research is financially supported by many of the world’s leading corporations including Coca-Cola, Kellogg’s, Procter & Gamble, Nielsen, Turner Broadcasting, Mars Inc. and many others.

Byron’s first book How Brands Grow: what marketers don’t know has been called one of the most influential marketing books of the past decade (Warc, 2015) and was voted marketing book of the year by AdAge readers. In 2015 he published the follow-up How Brands Grow Part 2 with Professor Jenni Romaniuk, and he has also written a textbook Marketing: Theory, Evidence, Practice which reflects modern knowledge about marketing and evidence-based thinking. Byron has co-hosted, with Professor Jerry Wind, two conferences at the Wharton Business School on the laws of advertising, and is on the editorial board of five journals.

10:00am

Digital DNA, Science and Segmentation

Exploring the intersection of why Trump happened, how survivalist innovation works, and how GRONADE looks at marketing challenges through scientific lenses. Tomer will discuss how a blend of segmentation, data washing and creative acquisition, and modelling a quantitative persona helped Screen Australia and Westpac optimise their respective growth objectives. Coupled with validation experimentation, this iteratively results in some of the lowest possible cost-per-action as a result.

Tomer Garzberg

Founder & CEO, GRONADE

Tomer Garzberg has over a decade of experience in quantitative growth with foreign tech markets, and is the founder and CEO of GRONADE, a creative data solutions company working with enterprise and government to solve marketing, product, revenue, risk, process, R&D and social challenges. The GRONADE toolbox includes data science, artificial intelligence, behavioural analysis, design thinking and real world experimentation.

10:30am

It Ain’t Over til The Big Data Sings: When Data Does More Than Just Describe Things

Using two case studies drawn from the creative industries (music and film) this presentation looks at how and why we can make more creative use of our data. It asks, how do we get our data to sing, rather than just use it to describe the status quo? And conversely, how might data get us to sing? Let’s put the gig back into your gigabytes, the beat in your beta, the rhythm in your algorithms.

Deb Verhoeven

Deb Verhoeven is Chair and Professor of Media and Communication at Deakin University, and Director of the Humanities Networked Infrastructure (HuNI) project (http://huni.net.au).
In 2016 she was appointed inaugural Vice Chancellor’s Library Fellow.
She served as inaugural Deputy Chair of the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia (2008-2011) and as CEO of the Australian Film Institute (2000-2002).
She is Director of the Kinomatics Project (http://kinomatics.com), an interdisciplinary study that collects, explores, analyses and represents data about the creative industries.

11:05am

Morning Tea

11:25am

Using Neuroscience for Effective Creativity

In the competitive marketing landscape, it has become ever so increasingly difficult to stand out from the crowd, with many brands fighting over the same territories and attributes. So, it’s not simply a case of making a great ad anymore – it is knowing what elements in your creative reinforces and strengthens your brand attributes and using these elements in supporting media streams to maximise advertising effectiveness.

In this talk, Professor Emeritus Richard Silberstein shows how neuroscience can highlight the nuances that not only influence advertising effectiveness but also drive growth in a set of brand attributes.

Professor Emeritus Richard Silberstein

Chairman, Neuro-Insight

Richard Silberstein is a Professor Emeritus of Swinburne University of Technology.
Professor Emeritus Richard Silberstein holds a Ph.D. in neuroscience from the University of Melbourne and a BSc (Hon) majoring in physics from Monash University. He has over 30 years of cognitive neuroscience research experience and is the originator of Steady State Topography (SST) a brain imaging methodology. He has co-authored over 200 papers in the form of conferences presentations, journal articles and book chapters in various areas of cognitive and clinical neuroscience as well as consumer neuroscience. Richard is also the founder and chairman of Neuro-Insight Pty. Ltd, a commercial neuroscience services provider specializing in the field of marketing communications and advertising research.

12:10pm

The Science Behind Getting Innovation Right

With so many fails in the world of innovation, it’s a wonder people don’t use more proven techniques for getting innovation right. This talk will tell you how, drawing on real world examples, and the science behind them.

Dr Amantha Imber

Founder, Inventium

Dr Amantha Imber is an innovation psychologist, best-selling author, and founder of Australia’s leading innovation consultancy Inventium. Inventium has been recognised as one of Australia’s fastest growing companies in the BRW Fast 100 list, and was also awarded the BRW Client Choice Award for Best Management Consultancy in Australia. In 2016, Amantha was inducted into the Australian Business Women’s Hall of Fame.

With a PhD in organisational psychology, Amantha has helped companies such as Google, Coca-Cola, Disney, LEGO, Red Bull, American Express, Virgin Australia, Commonwealth Bank and many others innovate more successfully. Amantha was a finalist in the 2015 Telstra Business Women of the Year awards.

Amantha is the co-creator of the Australian Financial Review’s Most Innovative Companies list, an annual list that Inventium compiles, ranking Australia’s top innovators. Her thoughts have appeared in Harvard Business Review, The Huffington Post, Forbes, and Fast Company and she is the author of two best-selling books: “The Creativity Formula” and “The Innovation Formula”.

Amantha had an international record deal for her debut album Like Samantha without the S, prays to the God of Kevin Spacey and claims to have once been freakishly good at table tennis.

12:45pm

The Science of Music, Love and Marketing

The digital world has given us access to logic and decision-making power beyond human capacity. But inhuman pragmatism threatens the marketing industry with more and more young digital natives forgetting the irrational humanity of their audience. This session will explore two companies that used algorithms and data in a way that kept humans at the centre of their technology and how their approach can help marketers to remember the non-robots choosing their brands at the end of the customer journey.

Nicole McInnes

Managing Director Australia, eHarmony

For years Nicole has been fascinated with people and how they connect and has created a career finding the common point between brands, the world around us and what people want. With marketing and advertising experience across 23 years, Nicole uniquely combines creative whimsy with a deep understanding of marketing data and ROI. Stints with Dell, Amex, Ogilvy and now eHarmony, have convinced her these two often opposing pillars combined are the best future for brands. She believes that marketing can truly enhance people’s lives, especially when your company is built to create love and happiness through human connection.

Empathy is the capacity to enter into the hidden desires and unspoken needs and pains of people who are not from our tribe, a skill that uses imagination to piece together what it might feel like to be someone else. In a way, it’s almost a superpower which we get by being human.

Feeling and demonstrating empathy is tied to better performance at work, and especially to better leadership. Empathy is also crucial for customer service. In this session, The School of Life will lead you though why empathy is important in business and how help as further develop this emotional skill.

The School of Life is a global organisation dedicated to developing emotional intelligence. The School of life applies psychology, philosophy, and culture to everyday life and believe that emotional maturity is the key to better employee performance and engagement. The School of Life works with organisations to develop more emotionally mature workplace cultures. Empathy in Business is at The School of Life’s core.

Gauri Bhalla

National Business Program Manager

Gauri is an educator, entrepreneur and social innovation driver. She is the founder of Curious Collective, a design thinker, lean start up practitioner and ‘learn by doing’ methodologies. Her passion is to explore and challenge business models, to extract shared value. With the Collective, she designs and delivers capability and execution programs for organisations such as the Department of Education, the Experimentation program for CBA, the Innovation lab for MGSM, and a flagship leadership program for Stockland. She worked in global organisations then found her vocation in education and has worked for Universities such as Cambridge, Stanford and UTS.

As Faculty at The School of Life, she teaches corporate classes including “How to Think Like an Entrepreneur” and on Empathy, Failure and Leadership. Gauri finds people irresistibly interesting. She understands the power of continuing education to transform and enable individuals and organisations to fulfil their potential.

1:35pm

Lunch & MSIX Awards Presentation

2:40pm

Interactive Sessions: Select 3 from the below

Interactive Session 1
When the Robots Take Over, Will They Too Use Data to Meddle With Our Subconscious?

A light-hearted discussion about a heavy topic – the future of influence. First we (marketers) used research to understand what would influence people’s feelings and behaviours and whether what we were spending money on was working. Now we have marketing science, data and automation – all plugged together and run by machines. The global data duopoly currently hold the keys, but who’s really in control of this uncharted level of influence?

Thomas Mahon

He is currently busy doing just this with the team at Peazie; building technology that scientifically informs and powers thousands of advertising campaigns worldwide.

Thomas started his professional life as a marketer, then became a tech guy who set about building digital tools for marketers. All the while, Thomas remains passionate about learning new tricks and picking new trends; formulating a view along the way about what all this technology means for business and life.

Interactive Session 2
Chatbots, Voice and AI: How to Get It Wrong (and Right)

This session looks at wide scale research and testing that On Message has done to understand what consumers want from AI. Covering areas like voice marketing, chatbots and avatars, we look at what are the factors that will lead to large scale uptake of these channels. We will share learnings from our experience in this field with ING Direct, Foxtel, Facebook and Children’s Panadol.

Douglas Nicol

Owner/Partner, The Works/On Message

Douglas started life in the world of data driven marketing. His first client was a UK company that sold rubber sheets to incontinent people via direct response advertising. In this environment you learn quickly how to get response and what creates a profitable sale. Douglas came to Australia to set up the first in-house CRM team at George Patterson with the team growing to over 70 nationally in just seven years.

He was named Australian Direct Marketer of the Year and in 2008 was elected Chair of ADMA (Association for Data Driven Marketing and Advertising) Fast forward to today and Douglas is one of the owners and creative partners at The Works, an independent integrated advertising agency with a team of 85 where creative thinkers are on the forefront of client business.

The Works has grown fast and now counts Optus, GSK, ING Direct, AFL , Jim Beam, Intuit QuickBooks, Brother, Tetley, and Visit Canberra among its clients.

Douglas is passionate about digital and social media marketing and is the driving force behind the award winning Datafication project which for the last six years has delivered comprehensive analytics on how Australians engage across the top social platforms to reveal new trends and insights. In 2015 he delivered a TEDx talk on deceit in social media and in 2016 founded a startup sister agency to The Works called On Message, specializing in marketing via messaging apps.

Interactive Session 3
How to Work With and Not Against Our Animal Nature to Achieve Behaviour Change

Human nature was formed in a very different setting to which we now find ourselves. From our time on the savannah, well before we moved into cities and workplaces, we developed our basic set of nine instincts. These behaviours that served us well in our ancestral setting are alive and well in today’s workplaces and households. For people interested in human motivation and behaviour, it’s better to work with our animal nature then ignore or fight against it.

Andrew O’Keeffe is the Director of Hardwired Humans and Author of Hardwired Humans and The Boss. Andrew works with clients to help align leadership and people practices to human nature. Over the last decade he has spent time with legendary chimpanzee researcher Dr Jane Goodall.

When Dr Goodall visits Australia, she and Andrew have often collaborated to speak to business audiences – Dr Goodall speaking about chimps and Andrew speaking about humans!

Andrew O’Keeffe

Director, Hardwired Humans

Andrew O’Keeffe is the director of Hardwired Humans. He helps organisations align their leadership and change management practices to human nature. He is author of Hardwired Humans and The Boss. Andrew’s background includes senior HR roles with IBM and Optus. Early in his career he worked in industrial relations in the mining and manufacturing industries. He holds a bachelor of economics from The University of Sydney.

Andrew has the great privilege of spending time with Dr Jane Goodall, the legendary chimpanzee researcher. Over the last decade, when Dr Goodall has visited Australia she and Andrew have met up and often spoken together to business audiences. They speak about the implications of our social instincts to leadership; Dr Goodall speaking about chimpanzees and Andrew speaking about humans!

It’s a well-documented fact that the majority of people working in creative departments are still male. In this session Eaon Pritchard will explore whether there has been a patriarchal conspiracy to keep it a boys’ club, and how the changing nature of creativity means now’s the time for the pendulum to swing. And what can dancing chickens, puffer fish, Barry White and the birth of 1950’s rock’n’roll radio teach us about how to solve the problem?

Eaon Pritchard

Head of Strategy, Dentsu Mitchell

Eaon Pritchard is Head of Strategy at Dentsu Mitchell in Melbourne. A former Creative Director who switched to Planning his when he found out who Tessa Pollitt’s dad was, his agency pedigree also includes Weapon7 in London and Clemenger BBDO in Melbourne. He writes regularly for WARC and his first book is currently the subject of a bidding war among several publishers (not really).

4:00pm

Afternoon Tea

4:20pm

Making Data Human

Big data has become the mother of all marketing buzzwords. Palms sweat and hearts race as companies navigate their way through the complexities of software, hardware, legal, process, structure, and team toward overall business transformation.

While they deal in big data, Lexer are specifically focussed on human data – data that originates in people. In this talk, Lexer CEO, David Whittle, takes you through the quest to make data human – building a human data asset and sophisticated software for companies who genuinely want to understand and engage their customers better. He’ll also share his journey from one of Australia’s leading creative agencies, M&C Saatchi, to an Australian tech start-up going global.

David Whittle

CEO, Lexer

David has spent his career applying a passion for creativity and technology with his entrepreneurial spirit to drive transformative growth in companies he loves.

Since mid 2014, David has focussed on Lexer, a data and analytics software company. During this time, Lexer has grown 20x and now services global clients and the number 1 or 2 in almost every industry in Australia.

David also serves as a Non-Executive Director on the boards of MYER, GWS Giants Foundation and Melbourne Festival.

Prior to Lexer, David spent a decade with M&C Saatchi, locally and globally building the digital practice, starting new agencies and ultimately as Managing Director of M&C Saatchi Group in Australia.

David has a BA/BCOM from Deakin University with majors in Marketing, eCommerce, Public Relations and Sociology.

4:50pm

The War on Waste: Getting People Interested in Rubbish

Green doesn’t rate was the well trodden line in TV, before War on Waste captured Australia’s attention. In this talk Craig will talk through the tone and techniques used in ABC’s 3 part TV series ‘War on Waste’ (http://www.abc.net.au/tv/programs/war-on-waste/) that led to genuine behavioural change in the broader community.

Craig Reucassel

Comedian, Presenter, Waste Warrior

Craig Reucassel is an Australian writer and comedian who is best known for his work with The Chaser and for going through your bins on The War on Waste.

Craig and a group of friends founded The Chaser newspaper, which led to a number of ABC TV Chaser programs including The Election Chaser, CNNNN, The Chaser’s War on Everything, Yes We Canberra and The Hamster Wheel. Most recently he’s appeared on ABC inThe Chaser’s Media Circus, The Chaser’s Election Desk and the current series of satirical consumer affairs show The Checkout. In 2017 Craig hosted the War on Waste on ABC TV.

Craig was born in South Africa but moved to Australia at a young age. He attended Bowral Public School and Bowral High School, but despite this never became a famous cricketer. He then attended the University of Sydney, and graduated with honours in Bachelor of Economics (Social Science) and Bachelor of Laws.

At some point he also co-hosted the triple j shows Today Today, Bloody Sunday and The Race Race with fellow Chaser Chris Taylor. He has performed in David Williamson’s Jack of Hearts and Tim Firth’s Neville’s Island at The Ensemble.
Craig is married with three children. He has a cat and a dog that could do with a walk if you have any time.